Mafia Prince: Inside America's Most Violent Crime Family (46 page)

             
My cousin Chris is still in Atlantic City, running a successful business and doing well for himself, having the smarts to change his last name and distance himself from his father.

             
Tommy Del and Nicky Crow are out there somewhere, most likely in the Witness Protection Program. I never liked either one of them and one of my uncle’s biggest mistakes was making those guys and keeping them around. Tommy Del wasn’t even 100-percent Italian, for Christ’s sake. He and the Crow were always no good.

             
I stay in touch with the FBI agents who helped me and became my friends, guys like Gary Langan, Jim Maher, Jim Darcy, and Klaus Rohr. These guys are the real men of honor.

             
And how about all the guys that got whacked? And for what? Ange, Johnny Keys, Phil Testa, Sindone, Frank Monte—those types of individuals aren’t around anymore. They are like dinosaurs; they don’t exist. The Chickie Narduccis, the Caponigros. Nowadays, you got a bunch of kids who grew up on the street corner watching guys like Chuckie making moves, guys like Salvie, guys like Ciancaglini, but they didn’t grow up in
this thing,
they don’t know
La Cosa Nostra.
To them those words don’t mean nothing. They didn’t grow up like I grew up, or how Joe Punge grew up, or how Salvie grew up, or how the Narducci brothers grew up. To them
this life
is like the characters they see in
Goodfellas
or
The Sopranos.
But it’s not.

             
I love it here. I come for a couple of days here and there, maybe six different times a year. It’s very easy to blend in out here.

             
I hate to say it, because I happen to like the guy, but I think Joe Ligambi is gonna get convicted. How the fuck is he gonna beat those tapes, the ones the guy made who killed himself? But if anybody can do something with those tapes, it’s Joe’s lawyer Ed Jacobs. He took over where Bobby Simone left off.

             
Joe Ligambi got out of jail after my uncle and the rest of those guys won the Frankie Flowers retrial in 1997, and the word on the street was that he became the acting boss after Joey Merlino went to jail in 1999. Joe is 72 years old and is now back in jail facing a new RICO indictment. Joe was always a gentleman. He was part of Chuckie’s crew, and both me and my uncle liked him. Joe and my uncle were cellmates for a while when we were in Holmesburg. I hope Joe does okay with his trial, because I’d hate to see him spend the rest of his life in jail.

             
I believe Joey Merlino is gonna get pinched. A lot of people have a hard-on for this kid, including the FBI, the US attorneys office, and my uncle. Chuckie’s son is now living in South Florida after getting out of jail in 2011. He did 12 years on a racketeering case.

             
I never liked this kid. If Chuckie wasn’t his father’s son he woulda been dead 25 years ago. I would have killed him myself, but my uncle wouldn’t allow it because of Chuckie. That summer of 1996, when I went back to Atlantic City to see my grandmother, there was a hairdresser who was friendly with Joey Merlino and he sent her to Georgia Avenue to see my grandmother. The woman was friendly with my grandmother as well. She told my mother and my grandmother that Joey sent her over there to find out if I was there. When I found out about it, I told the woman, “Tell him I’m here and that I’d love to see him; tell him to stop by and say hello anytime he wants.” She told me later that when she delivered the message to him, he laughed and called me a “rat motherfucker.” But guess what—he knew I was there and he didn’t come.

             
My cousin Nicky Jr. is also back in jail again, in the same jail as Joe Ligambi, awaiting trial in two separate racketeering cases, one involving the Lucchese crime family in North Jersey, and the other involving a white-collar fraud case out of Camden. If he is convicted in either trial, he is likely going to spend the rest of his life behind bars. Nicky’s got a young wife, two young children, and both his mother and his brother Mark, who is still in a coma after almost 24 years, living in his house. From what I have been told, a group of nurses come by the house and help my uncle’s wife take care of Mark. I don’t know how that family will survive if Nicky gets convicted. They are barely surviving now.

             
My cousin’s not a gangster and he never was. The only thing he is guilty of being is a loyal son to my uncle. My uncle got him involved with trying to keep control of
La Cosa Nostra
after we went to jail and almost got Nicky killed. After that, my uncle got him involved with some half-ass wise guys in North Jersey who turned out to be rats, and he got Nicky sent to prison. Then my uncle got Nicky involved with Vic Amuso and the Luccheses and got him sent to jail again, and now he’s got not one, but two indictments. My uncle was even an unindicted coconspirator in the fraud case. That’s the kind of father my uncle is. My cousin owes my uncle absolutely nothing. I would love to see him cooperate with the government and make a life for himself, not for his father, but for himself and his family, his wife and kids.

             
That sums up virtually what everyone I know or have known that is relevant to my story or to the Philadelphia–Atlantic City
La Cosa Nostra,
with the exception of one person.

             
That person is my uncle, Nick Scarfo.

             
Several times during the mid-’80s, I came very close to actually killing my uncle. I had planned on doing it a couple of times on the way back from Philadelphia, when we would stop and get off of the Atlantic City Expressway out near Hammonton, so we could get out of the car and talk about a sensitive subject to avoid what my uncle thought were the bugs or listening devices that the law had planted in his car. He would motion for me to get off of an exit ramp and I would drive and find a dark stretch of road, usually in a wooded area or out near a farm, and we would get out of the car and walk maybe 100 feet, or so, and have whatever conversation he wanted to have. So many times we would be standing there and I’d be listening to him talk and I would start thinking about just blasting him right there and shutting him up once and for all. Just emptying the gun into him and leaving him there in the woods for some farmer or some hunter to find.

             
It started after he had killed Salvie, and after he told me that he wanted me to kill the Blade, Chuckie, and Lawrence. At this point, there was no more honor, no more respect, and no more loyalty.
La Cosa Nostra, this thing of ours,
became
this thing of his,
and it was all about his unquenchable thirst for power, for greed, for vengeance, and for ego. I no longer swore my allegiance to my uncle, a man who I gave the first 35 years of my life to.

             
I thought about sneaking into his apartment and shooting him while he slept, using a pillow to muffle the sound so that I wouldn’t wake up my grandmother in the apartment downstairs.

             
Many times when he and I would be on our boat,
The Usual Suspects,
down in Florida, I would catch myself daydreaming about throwing him overboard and leaving him in the middle of the ocean to drown.

             
This is how much I grew to hate this man.

             
When we went to jail in 1987, I knew that it was over between me and him, no matter what happened. If somehow I was acquitted, I was planning on taking Maria, my mother, and Little Philip, and leaving Atlantic City, my uncle, and
La Cosa Nostra.
If I lost
the trial and I got sentenced to spend the rest of my life in prison, I knew that I would be away from my uncle in jail.

             
So either way you look at it, it was over.

             
If we hadn’t gotten locked up when we did, I would have eventually killed him, and I promise you there wouldn’t have been too many people sad to see him go.

             
My decision to cooperate with the government wasn’t like Nicky Crow’s or Tommy Del’s, or even Sammy the Bull’s. I wasn’t out to save myself. I had already gotten 45 years. It was over for me. My decision to cooperate was to send a message to one person, my uncle, that I was absolutely disgusted by him and that I was no longer going to live my life for him and that I wanted absolutely nothing to do with him for the rest of my days on this earth, wherever they were spent. This decision was made by me in that holding cell on November 1, 1988, the day my cousin Mark tried to kill himself and his evil, no-good father didn’t shed a single tear for him. That was it for me; that was my breaking point.

             
So am I a rat? Let me ask you this: if you’re a kid and you find out there’s no Santa Claus when you are nine years old, are you going to still believe in Santa Claus when you’re 10, 11, or 12? Of course not. You’d stop believing and that would be the end of it.

             
I believed in
La Cosa Nostra, this thing of ours.
It was something I was taught from the time I was a little boy. It’s how I was raised. Honor, respect, loyalty—these were the values instilled in me by my uncle from the time I was eight years old and I drove in that pickup truck with him—as his decoy after he killed Reds Caruso—and listened to him tell me how he killed the guy, how he stabbed him with the ice pick, and what the guy’s final words were. I was eight years old and this was my life. I was 23 when I killed Louie DeMarco, and 26 when I killed Vincent Falcone. I got made when I was 27, and I became a
caporegime
at 28. I did it all for my uncle and
La Cosa Nostra, this thing of ours.
I was what you would call a true believer up until I was 33 years old and I became the underboss in 1986, and I stopped believing because the principles I had believed in—the honor, respect, and loyalty—were gone, if they ever truly existed.

             
We killed Salvie, our most loyal captain. How’s that for loyalty? We shot Joe Salerno’s father and killed two guys in front of
their mothers, and my uncle wanted me to slit his wife’s throat. Where’s the honor in that?

             
Other than that, what is his legacy? His oldest son disowned him and changed his name. His middle son almost got killed and is now in jail because he listens to his father and his father has never given him good advice. And his youngest son tried to kill himself and is still in a coma 24 years later. He even wanted his own wife dead. New York took him down as boss and, in the end, his sister and even his own mother abandoned him, choosing to leave Atlantic City and coming to live with me, the person he hates more than anyone on the planet.

             
When I think of my uncle now, I no longer have a desire to see him dead. It’s not because I found God or anything like that, it’s just that I have a different perspective now. I actually hope he lives to be 120 years old and finds his way into the
Guinness Book of World Records,
rotting in that cage he calls his home, knowing every day what an absolute failure of a human being he was—as a father, as a husband, as a son, as a brother, as an uncle, as a friend, as a mob boss, and most importantly, as a man.

             
Fuck my uncle.